What Is Love? An Inquiry Reexamined

By Keith Tidman

Someone might say, I love my wife or husband. I love my children and grandchildren. I love my extended family. I love my friends.

All the while, that same someone might also avidly announce, I love…

Conversation. Mozart’s music. Cherry blossoms. Travel abroad. Ethnic cuisine. Democracy. Memories of parents. Sipping espresso. Paradoxes. Animal kingdom. Mysteries of quantum theory. Hiking trails. Absence of war. A baby’s eye contact. Language of mathematics. Theatre performances. History. African savanna. Freedom. Daydreaming on the beach. Loving love. And, yes, philosophy.

We’re free to fill in the blanks with endless personal possibilities: people, events, occasions, experiences, and things we care deeply about, which happen providentially to get elevated by their singular meaning to us on an individual level. The neurons that get triggered in each of us, as-yet unexplainably making what you uniquely experience by way of love as different from what everyone else definably feels — the subjectivism of sensation.

A hazard in applying the word ‘love’ across manifold dimensions like this is that we may start to cloud the concept, making it harder to distinguish love from competitor sentiments — such as simply ‘liking’, ‘fancying a lot’, or maybe ‘yearning’. Uncertainty may intrude as we bracket sentiments. The situation is that love itself comes in many different kinds. Steeped in a historical, cultural, spiritual, scientific, rational, and emotional melding pot. Three of the best-known semantic variants for love, whose names originate from Greek, descend to us from early philosophers.

They are Eros (pictured above on his pedestal in London), which is intensely passionate, romantic, and sexual love (famously fêted by the arts). Intended also for species proliferation. Agape, which is a transcendent, reciprocated love for God and for all humanity, sometimes couched as a form of brotherly love. And philia, which is unconditional love for family and friends, and even one’s country. As well as ‘companionate’ love enjoyed, for example, by a couple later in life, when passion’s embers may have cooled. Philia evokes a mix of virtues, like integrity, fairness, parity, and acquaintance.

Those terms and definitions imply a rational tidiness that may not be deserved when it comes to the everyday, sometimes-fickle interpretation of love: when and how to appropriately apply the word. The reality is that people tend to parse ‘love’ along sundry lengths, widths, and heights, which can be subjective, even idiosyncratic, and often self-servingly changeable to suit the moment and the mood. Individual, family, and community values are influential here.

Love may even be outright ineffable: that is, beyond logical explanation and the search for the source of societal norms. Enough so, perhaps, to make the likes of Aristotle, St. Augustine, Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, Bertrand Russell, and Simone de Bouvier — among other romantics and misanthropes, who thought about and critiqued the whimsicality of love — turn in their graves.

At the very least, we know that love, in its different kinds, can be heady, frenzied stuff, seemingly hard-wired, primal, and distractingly preoccupying. Of course, the category of love might shift — progressively, or abruptly — in accordance with evolving experiences, interactions, and relationships, as well as the sprouting of wholly novel circumstances. Arguably the biology, chemistry, and synapses of the brain, creating the complexities of mind, deterministically calling the shots.

Some contest that the love that others may claim to feel is not actually love, but something akin to it: either friendship, or impassioned obsession, or veneration, or lust, or appreciation of companionship, or esteem, or simply liking someone or something a whole lot. Distinctions between love and alternative sensations, as they wax and wane over time, are for the individual person to decide. We correctly accede to this element of individuality.

Love, as for all the other emotions just mentioned, has a flipside. Together, opposites make wholes — their serving as the source of what’s possible. Along with love can come dispiriting negatives, like possessiveness, insecurity, distrust, noxiousness, suspicion, sexist hindrances, jealousy, and objectification.

There can be a tension between these latter shadowy forces and such affirmative forces as bright-spiritedness, cleverness, romanticism, enchantment, physical attractiveness, empathy, humour, companionability, magnetism, kindness, and generosity. Such a tension usually lessens with the passage of time, as the distinctions between the good and the bad become less hazy and easier to sort from among.

There’s another form of tension, too: Individual values — acquired through personal reflection, and through family and community convictions, for example — may bump up against the stressors of love. Among love’s influences is sometimes having to rethink values. To refine norms in order to accommodate love. There may be justifiable reasons to believe we gain when we inspiringly and aspiringly love someone or something.

The gradations of moral and behavioural values challenge our autonomy — how we calculatedly manage life — as the effects of love invade our moment-to-moment decision-making. Choices become less intentional and less free, as we deferentially strive to preserve love. We might anxiously attempt to evade what we perceive, rightly or misguidedly, as the vulnerabilities of love.

When all is weighed, love appears wittingly compelling: not to cosset self-seeking indulgences, but rather to steer us toward a life affectionately moored to other people and experiences that serve as the fount of inspiration and authentic meaning. In this way, rationality and love become mutually inclusive.

Poem: Speculating on Providence

Posted by Chengde Chen

Woodcut by Hans Schäufelein, Augsburg 1513.
Christ and Mary as intercessors /
God the Father shooting plague arrows.

 

Besides the known causes of the Covid pandemic

I suspect that God had a few more intentions

A coincidence cannot be counted as providence

But causality deserves logical proof nevertheless

 

He must have wanted to help us fight climate change

Otherwise why did Covid bring a hidden green hope?

We had almost lost our confidence in reducing CO2

The pandemic dropped it decisively to an ideal level

 

Galileo’s telescope showed Jupiter’s satellite system

Letting people 'see' how the solar system works

Isn’t Covid like a low-carbon possibility experiment

Demonstrating the non-inevitability of global warming?

 

He must have wanted us to cope with the lockdown

Otherwise why did Covid arrive behind the Internet?

People of the Net can be isolated without isolation

Meeting across the Earth redefines time and space

 

The lights of myriad families light up screens wherever

The digitalised joys or sorrows are shared whenever

Without the personal contacts in this semi-real space

The half-dead world may have been dead completely!

 

He must have also wanted Covid to warn science

Otherwise why was it as massacring as bio-weapons?

If a virus can turn the world upside down like this

Won’t genetic engineering threaten our existence?

 

Inside those labs capable of manipulating molecules

They are full of the scientific urge to take such risks

Human self-destruction has been a matter of time

Can the Creator not worry if His work is to be wasted?

 

It's hard to say if these were really His thinking

But, believing or not, you'd better so assume

So as to understand the philosophy of providence –

Turning empirical logic into the rationality of faith!

 

(Chengde Chen is the author of Five Themes of Today: philosophical poems, and of the novel: The Thought-read Revolution. chengde.chen@hotmail.com )

Farmer Hogget, the Limited God

Posted by Eduardo Frajman

One beautiful autumn afternoon not too long ago, my daughters and I were coming home from an errand. They ran ahead of me, headed for our front yard to climb our knobby, twisted tree, or jump headfirst onto a leaf pile, or some other such wholesome activity that would add a tiny brick to the edifice of their innocent, golden childhoods. 

As I reached them I saw my eldest had stopped. She was prodding at something with her foot, nudging it back and forth. Though half-buried, I immediately recognized it for what it was. “What is it?,” my freckled-faced cherub asked. I saw her little sister step towards us curiously, an expectant smile on her face. The thing was roundish, about the size of a plum. Two blade-like stalks protruded out of one end. Amid the black dirt, I could make out patches of fur and a rigid, unseeing eye. “It’s a rock,” I said. My daughter shot me an incredulous, accusatory look as she wailed “Then why does it have ears?!”




The aftermath of our encounter with the decapitated bunny head will be familiar to most parents. “What happened to it?,” was the first question, the easiest one to answer. “I don’t know. Maybe a dog killed it, or a fox. Maybe it got caught under a lawnmower.”

“That’s sad,” said my youngest. “Why did the bunny have to die?” That was the big one, the one most of us can’t satisfactorily answer to ourselves, let alone to the little children who are so ignorant as to believe that we know everything. Why do bad things happen? Why is there evil in the world?

Regardless of how I chose to tackle the issue among the fallen leaves that day, I don’t really remember, I indubitably cracked the foundation of their innocence with a brief but unavoidable lecture on The Way Things Are. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all of us, parents and children and bunnies, could frolic about, carelessly, eternally? But we can’t. That’s just not The Way Things Are. “But why not?,” my daughters insisted. That’s when I brought them inside, disinfected their hands, and slipped an old video about a lovable piglet called Babe (1996) into the DVD player.

In philosophical circles, the attempt to answer the question of evil is called “theodicy.” In its traditional Judeo-Christian form, theodicy aims to reconcile the existence of an all-powerful, loving, infinitely good God with the indisputable evidence that the world is awash with undeserved pain and suffering. This is what Babe is about. Yes, that Babe, the one about the talking pig. Babe, for those of you not in the know, is taken from among his brothers and sisters and becomes a prize at a county fair where he is won by Farmer Hogget. Babe meets the farm’s inhabitants: the sheepdogs Fly and Rex and their litter of puppies, Ferdinand the Duck, who is pretending to be a rooster to avoid being eaten, Duchess the evil cat (aren’t they all?), and the sheep, led by old and wise Maa. Babe gets into some low-key adventures until he is recruited by Farmer Hogget to help herd the sheep. This leads to some trouble with Rex, who besides being the alpha sheepdog is also the keeper of law and order among the animals.

Eventually, Farmer Hogget decides Babe is such a good sheep-pig that he enters him into a sheep dog competition, which of course he wins as everyone cheers deliriously. Everyone loves Babe, though it is often dismissed as just another flick selling the well-worn bill of goods to kids and their parents: “follow your star,” “be yourself,” “there is no secret ingredient.” It’s easy to see why this happens. The film follows the eponymous hero as he comes to understand the rules of Hogget Farm and, seemingly, challenges them by becoming a “sheep-pig.” But this is a misunderstanding based on inattentive watching. Babe never chooses to become a sheep-pig. The choice is made for him by Farmer Hogget – “The Boss,” as he is known to the farm animals. Babe is not a story about a young pig finding agency and thereby finding happiness. It is an allegory about the nature of God’s relationship with His creatures.

That the film is a theological parable is suggested in numerous details throughout. The young runt who will become Babe is “chosen” from among “thousands of pigs.” When Farmer Hogget and Babe first lay eyes on each other, they are said to share “a faint sense of some common destiny.” Later Farmer Hogget’s idea to turn Babe into a sheep pig becomes “the stuff of destiny” and Babe becomes the “pig of destiny.” The narration is inflected with Bible-like pronouncements – “a great flood came to the valley,” “there was only one fate for a creature that took the life of a sheep” – and the ancestry of both sheepdogs and sheep is treated as a marker of atavistic significance. On the night before the sheepdog trials, Hogget is shown watching a choir of children dressed as angels singing on television. And there is, of course, the matter of Babe’s parentage. The little pig, who seemingly has no father, boasts no fewer than three mothers: his biological pig mother, Fly the sheepdog who adopts him, and Maa the sheep who imbues him with moral sense.

This is not to say that Babe is a proselytizing work, looking to turn children into believing, unthinking Christians, along the lines of far inferior films such as the recent Little Boy (2015) or God’s Not Dead (2014). Far from it. Babe means instead to problematize belief, to highlight the very difficult questions raised by existing in a world with God in it. The pigs depicted at the start of the movie, for example, are shown lounging in their stys, waiting to be taken to the slaughterhouse. As they walk towards their deaths, they are said to believe they are headed for “pig paradise,” which is a “world of endless pleasures.” In other words, their religious beliefs serve them as consolation for the unavoidable fate that awaits them. There are plenty of followers of the Judeo-Christian tradition who use religion in this way. After all, God states in both the Old and New Testaments that He will reward those who follow His commandments:

“I will give the rain for your land in its season” (Deuteronomy 11:14)

and “rejoice and be glad, for great is your reward in Heaven” (Matthew 5:11)

- promising that the sufferers in this world will be eternally rewarded in the next.

But the Bible also warns its readers not to accept this message uncritically, most explicitly in the Book of Job, its own stab at theodicy. Job is a good man, a blameless man, and thus deservedly prosperous and happy. Responding to a challenge, God allows Satan to make Job suffer, for no evident reason other than to see what happens. Satan takes away Job’s possessions, he kills Job’s children, he causes Job to endure great physical pain. Taken to his breaking point, Job lashes out against God. Why do I suffer?, asks Job. I don’t deserve to suffer.

God’s answer is meant to give pause to uncritical believers:

“Who is this who darkens my plans with words without knowledge?” (Job 38:1).

How do you know why I do anything?, asks God. Who are you to question Me? Who are you to pretend you understand how the world works, how anything works? You are nobody, says God to Job. You don’t know anything and you never will. And so, can I tell my daughters that it’s okay the bunny lost its head because it’s now hopping in the never-ending fields of bunny heaven? The Book of Job says no. It says that it is not in our capacity to understand why bunnies lose their heads, why pain and suffering pervade the world. It says only God knows the whys of The Way Things Are.

Likewise, it is not the animals’ place on Hogget Farm to question, let alone challenge, The Way Things Are. The only one who tries, Ferdinand the duck, finds only failure and frustration (though not, notably, punishment). Only The Boss can alter the rules. The film, of course, does not mean for Farmer Hogget to be seen literally as God. He and his wife are normal humans among many: they go to church and celebrate Christmas, they have children and grandchildren, she is the “assistant general secretary of the northeast region” for the Women’s Country Guild, he has “a long and honorable association” with the National Sheepdog Association. On the other hand, the beginning of the film goes out of its way to underline the couple’s specialness. Mrs. Hogget’s victory in a cooking competition is deemed “not a matter of luck” (she is later seen placing her trophy in a shelf stuffed with them). As the couple walk around the county fair, the image fades to black except for a small circle, which follows them around for a few additional moments, indicating their chosen status. Their power, such as it is, is mundane and earthbound, not supernatural. It is only in their own domains that each one of them lords. Inside the house, as made clear by Duchess the cat, it is Mrs. Hogget who is rules, while the farmer deserves only the status of “The Boss’ husband.”

To the farm animals, however, Farmer Hogget is god. His rule is unchallenged, and the animals all understand that their function in the world is to serve and obey him; even Ferdinand the duck, who doesn’t want to be eaten but still knows he must find a way to make himself useful. Hogget is a creator god. He is shown making a dollhouse for his granddaughter, a new gate for the farm, building the obstacles to train Babe for the sheepdog trials, lovingly placing the wool of a recently-shorn sheep on his wagon. He is a patient, loving god. He always has a kind word for his animals, “good dog,” “that’ll do,” and never ever loses his temper. He is a just but merciful god, as is shown by his actions after Maa is killed by a wild dog. The evidence points to Babe, and the Boss makes ready to execute the sentence he deems appropriate, but when he learns of his mistake he changes his planned course of action, like God does towards the city of Nineveh in the Book of Jonah.

Hogget is also a wise god. He is truthful, but is not beyond using slight subterfuge when it suits his aims. He follows his intuition because he knows “that little ideas can turn into the stuff of destiny,” as when he decides to spare Babe from becoming roast pork and turn him into the pig of destiny, but is willing to learn new things, as when he uses the fax machine he initially mistrusted. He realizes that Rex the dog, the Old-Testament prophet of the farm and the keeper of its laws, attacks Babe, the New Testament prophet of love, out of jealousy and fear of being replaced. It’s worth remembering that the only character with any stake in the outcome of the climactic sheepdog trials is Hogget himself. Fly articulates the most awful possible outcome: “The Boss will look like an idiot!” After Babe triumphs in the trials, after the animals in the farm and the crowd in the stands erupt in celebration, the camera shows the two of them standing alone, a ray of sunshine emerging from the clouds and shining down on the two chosen ones. It then shows Hogget’s face from Babe’s perspective, a halo of sunlight around his head, projecting gentleness and pride and love. “That’ll do, pig. That’ll do.”

And so, Babe’s happiest state manifests itself in a moment of service to his god. And yet, just the night before, Babe had sunk into a deep crisis of faith. In preparation for the trials the Boss had modified The Ways Things Are. While hitherto only dogs and cats had been allowed in the house, Babe was invited in to partake in the best food and the warmth of the fireplace. Duchess the cat was livid at this unwanted invasion onto her turf. She tried to scratch at Babe, but this only earned her temporary banishment. On her second try, she went for the more subtle approach. “Why do you think you’re here?,” she asked the pig. “Why are any of us here?,” he parried. All creatures have a purpose, Duchess told Babe. The dogs herd the sheep, the cow gives milk, the cat looks beautiful. “What do you think your purpose is?” Babe didn’t know, so Duchess told him the truth, that a pig’s purpose is to be eaten. Babe could not believe it. He ran to his adoptive mother Fly and asked her whether humans ate his biological mother, the rest of his family. “Yes, dear,” said Fly. “Even The Boss?” “Yes, dear.” Babe was inconsolable. He wouldn’t eat or move. The other animals were heartbroken. Babe had lost his innocence. He had learned the awful implications of The Way Things Are. Even Rex, his former nemesis, could not stand to see him like that. “The Boss needs you!,” he pleaded.

Why does God allow for such things to happen? Why does Babe have to lose his family so we can put bacon in our burgers? If God is all-powerful, why doesn’t He just create some bacon trees, or make bacon taste like dirt for that matter? One of the most famous answers to the question was proposed by Leibniz in 1710, in the only book that he published in his lifetime, called the Essays on Theodicy, in the process introducing the new term.

It’s obvious, according to Leibniz, that God is all-powerful, as well as infinitely good. It stands to reason that if evil exists, it does so because God decided that a world with evil in it is better than a world without evil since God, being all-powerful, could only create “the best of all possible worlds.” Imagine a painting that contains all the possible colors. Some colors are gorgeous and pleasing to the eye, others are dreary or unpleasant to look at. Would the most beautiful painting use only the most beautiful colors? Or is it possible that, by judiciously using the ugly colors, one could enhance the impact of the beautiful colors and thereby achieve an even greater result? For example, anybody would agree that compassion is a great thing, and that a world where compassion exists is better than a world in which it doesn’t. But, in order to feel compassion, a person needs to witness someone else suffering. No suffering, no compassion. The same is probably true of most positive emotions, many of which are magnified by being preceded by bad emotions. Consider the pleasure of eating something after an extended period of fasting.

Leibniz’s “best of all possible worlds” theory was criticized by many for being, at best, too naïve and, at worst, willingly blind to the mind-shattering levels of bad things that actually exist in the world. Voltaire famously satirized Leibniz in Candide (1759), a novel in which a young man’s suffering of tragedy upon tragedy is played for laughs not unlike those elicited by Willie E. Coyote’s travails in Looney Tunes films. Imagine that, early on in your life, you discover that your parents, siblings, everyone like you, is being raised as food for a “superior” species. Imagine that, any day, you could be killed and eaten by your “owner.” Would you conclude from this knowledge that the world you live in is the best possible world?

As David Hume put it in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, you can only get to Leibniz’s conclusion if you start out by assuming an infinitely good, all-powerful God exists. If you start by looking at the evidence, however, you might conclude something else entirely. You might conclude that God doesn’t exist, that the world is just the random consequence of an immeasurably complex series of natural laws and events that led us to a state of affairs in which I love my daughters so much that I find it necessary to shield them from grief by explaining away a decapitated bunny head. Or perhaps, as some have argued, God does exist but He’s just plain nasty. Hume didn’t find this likely, since just as there are plenty of terrible things in the world, there are plenty of wonderful things in it as well. Perhaps God is just like us, only more so. This is essentially what the ancient Greeks believed.

In the film, though, Babe chooses a different option. The same one that, curiously, Rabbi Harold Kushner proposes in his now-mostly-forgotten bestseller When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Kushner begins with the problem of evil as seen by Job as well as Babe. Since there is no doubt that evil exists, how can it be that an all-good, all-powerful God also exists? He then examines the evidence available to him, in defiance of God’s admonition at the end of the Book of Job. Kushner rejects the idea that God does not exist, and he cannot bring himself to suggest that God might be evil. It follows, therefore, that God must not be all-powerful. God is in charge, but not fully in charge.

The same is true of Farmer Hogget. He has all the qualities one wants in a god: he is capable, wise, merciful, full of grace. But he is not fully in charge of what happens. He cannot prevent his sheep from being stolen, or Fly to lose her puppies, or Maa from being mauled by a wild dog. He cannot make a world in which pigs and ducks are not eaten. And so, when Babe the pig is lying in his house, refusing to eat or to budge, about to die of dehydration, Farmer Hogget can do nothing but sing the plaintive song of the limited god:

“If I had words to make a day for you/I’d sing you a morning golden and new/I would make this day last for all time/Give you a night deep in moonshine.”

“I love you”, says Farmer Hogget to Babe with his song, but certain things even I can’t make happen. “I can’t make a perfect world. I can’t take away your pain. Are you still with me?”

Understanding the Geneva Convention

“No physical or mental torture may be inflicted on prisoners of war
to secure from them information of any kind whatever.” – Article 17,
Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War ”

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A poem by Chengde Chen 

Yugoslavia, sometime in World War II. A refugee family in Serbia

Understanding the Geneva Convention

We are enemies –
why can we kill in war but allow no torture?
Does physiology regard death better than pain –
the struggle for survival is a race to the end?
Or philosophy holds ends higher than means –
loving God requires rushing to heaven?
Anyone who can prove either of these
proves Geneva is larger than the world; otherwise,
aren’t the Conventions like the RSPCA of carnivores –
protection ensures slaughtering only the undamaged?

This humanitarian law, solemn and noble as it is,
is just a desperate supplement to a Platonic maxim.
Although “only the dead have seen the end of war”,
let’s conduct barbarity in the most civilised manner –
seeing the gaps between battles as peace, or the seconds
between drawing the sword and striking as kindness.
War, however, has to be the war animal’s way of life –
no matter how we pursue “off-battlefield humanity”.
Part-time animals are animals still, hence a red cross –
to acknowledge the bloodiness of humanitarianism!

Words can’t redeem the mountains of white bones,
because ideals can’t domesticate genes.
Our ability to idealise ourselves
can only deepen the tragedy of civilisation.
Oh, the ever extending ripples of Lake Geneva,
you are not leisure waves by wind flirting with water,
but man’s unending hopelessness about human nature.
If you aren’t the longest sighs of the hopeless,
you must be the deepest sadness of the sighs.

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Chengde Chen is the author of Five Themes of Today: philosophical poems. Readers can find out more about Chengde and his poems here

Reason and Contradiction

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

“Beginning to think is beginning to

be undermined.”  –Albert Camus.

What is reason? Like an axe in our hands, we use it, we don't contemplate it. But we do know that we use it to make sense of things. We do know that we (puzzlingly) apply it to a variety of seemingly disconnected fields: science, ethics, and art, among others. And then, perhaps most importantly, we know that reason is a conscious activity.

One of the most important characteristics of our consciousness is that it kicks in where contradiction arises. Imagine a pendulum, swinging, swinging, swinging. So little contradiction does this present that, rather than producing consciousness, people use pendulums to induce hypnosis. But let the pendulum suddenly drop, and we quickly jump forward to examine what has happened to it -- for then it has contradicted our expectations. 

Things like this happen all the time, in many different ways. A shadow passes over my table in a restaurant. I feel a sudden pain under my foot. Or there is a strange taste in my coffee. These all contradict what I expect – and immediately I want to know: What is it? Why? Where did this come from?

 

Instinctively, we think of reason as a constructive enterprise. We use it to build houses, design computers, plan conferences, or construct theories. Yet when we examine it more closely, it seems that all such activities are in some way rooted in some kind of contradiction – or perhaps rather, in setting contradictions aside:

We build a house because we don't have a roof over our heads. We design a computer because we lack the power of thought. We call a conference because we need to connect. Or we construct a new theory because the old one won't work. Jean van Heijenoort, the historian of mathematical logic, wrote, “The ordinary notion of consistency involves that of contradiction, which again involves negation.” To put it simply, reason is the innate sense of contradiction. Call it our sixth sense.

This is not a new idea. Bernard Bosanquet suggested that reason kicks in where we have two competing explanations for the same thing in our minds. In fact no less a luminary than Immanuel Kant considered that reason is the power of synthesizing into unity (from disunity, we presume) the concepts which are provided by the intellect. By way of example, Galileo reconciled the sub-lunar and the supra-lunar worlds. James Maxwell united electricity and magnetism. And Albert Einstein melded space and time.

Many would object. The truth is in our first guess, they would say: namely, that reason is a constructive enterprise. In fact reason, they remind us, is a magnificent builder of things, both abstract and real: quantum theory, for instance, or the Golden Gate bridge. And yet, even the things which we construct may be viewed as reverse processes, launched from needs and contradictions.

Take the simple example of a house. A house is needed. Therefore a roof is needed – and walls and foundations. We know then that we cannot purchase a roof as a roof. But this contradicts our need – for a roof. The best we can do is timbers and tiles. But tiles must be secured. Now we need nails. And so on. In fact the best of minds know how to anticipate all contradiction. Thus through the application of reason, we solve a great complex of needs, then paradoxically claim that we have “constructed” something.

In fact the entire scientific enterprise, according to Karl Popper, is an exercise in what he called falsification. Reason may reveal that a theory is wrong, but it can never prove that it is right. 

More broadly. Wherever contradiction melts away, there we find that the holistic qualities of life emerge, which we so greatly value and desire: among them love, beauty, and grace. But apply reason to them, and they disappear. In fact, even the scientific quest is described as a search for beauty. We are able to appreciate the “beauty” of simple equations because they are about reduction and reconciliation – just as we desire any kind of simplicity, simplification, even simplistic-ness. “You can recognize truth,” wrote Richard Feynman, “by its beauty and simplicity.”

What then is reason? We may now summarise it like this: reason “flags” contradictions. Wherever we find a contradiction – or perhaps rather, wherever there arises a contradiction for me (sight, smell, touch, and all), reason pays attention. In this way, reason helps us to create a world without contradiction – a conceptual arrangement of the world which is “one”.

Stay with this idea. It further helps us to resolve the age old conflict between reason and passion:

Long has it been debated whether reason is our most basic driving force, or passion. It is reason, wrote John Locke. It is passion, countered David Hume. Which, then, is it to be? We know from recent empirical advances that it is our conceptual arrangement of the world which feeds our visceral (“gut”) feelings. That is, when my view of the world is held up against the world itself – specifically, where I encounter novelty, discrepancy, or interruption in the world around me – this leads to motivation. Even a dog, when faced with food which it does not expect to see in its bowl, is visibly affected.

In sum, what reason does is to modify our conceptual arrangement of the world. Our conceptual arrangement of the world, in turn, produces passion, whenever it contradicts the world. In this way, reason and passion are both masters and slaves. Reason does not directly control our passions, yet we may trace our passions back to reason.

Simply put: reason in, passion out.

Poetry to Refute Dawkinsism

A special poem by Chengde Chen to launch the new blog

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How to Refute Dawkins’ Atheism

 

Dear Professor Dawkins, 

Yes, your bestseller, The God Delusion, is bought by millions;
more so your TV debates taking on archbishops, hotly YouTubed.
“No belief without evidence”, your atheist crusade is convincing,
like sounding the new death-knell of religion, with web power.

When the believers defend faith with Scripture,
you dare them to “walk on water” or “turn water into wine”.
When they count the moral good religion brings,
you attribute enough wars and scandals to the Church.
When they’re lost for words, or deeds, and God is laughed at,
you harvest applause, like the invincible spokesman of reason.

However, let me ask you a hypothetical question: 
 
“If you knew it was the case that, without the fear of God,
human society would collapse, would you still reject religion?”
 
If you say “yes”, surely you would see how irrational you were –
worse than cutting off a man’s head to treat his headache.
A rational person, as you firmly claim to be, has to say “no” –
doesn’t this mean faith could be justified without evidence?

Reason has two functions: seeking truth and weighing expediency;
if we can’t tell if it’ll rain, we’ll carry an umbrella as a precaution.
Since “God’s existence” can neither be proved, nor disproved,
it’s reasonable for man to discipline himself with the imagination,
which wasn’t a “delusion” that happened to occur in all cultures,
but a spiritual organ driven by the evolutionary need to coexist.

Without the simple idea of the-Almighty-for-good-and-against-evil, 
what could have turned a race of jungle animal into a moral being?
True or not, the great invention of man’s “second heart”
deserves Nobel returning to history to award his best prize! 

 Yours sincerely, 

     An agnostic-who-explains-religion-with-evolution
 

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Readers can find out more about Chengde and his poems here

Aspects of Mind

by Thomas Scarborough
 

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Part I. Mind and Matter

I tap my finger on a table-top. I drink a glass of milk. I feel the warmth of the sun on my face. Such experiences seem perfectly real to me. So does the passion I have for my diesel pick-up, my grief over my grandmother's passing, or the fact that I am a Yorkshireman. Which means that, on the surface of it, my life seems real to me, through and through.

Now consider what this means to me philosophically. It seems to me, therefore, that I am living in a real world. It is not imagined, or illusory. Further, it would seem to me that I am an observerof this world, not merely a “robotic” presence there. And on this basis, it would seem to me that I have a mind which observes reality: mind here, reality there, which separates my mind from the matter which it observes.

If it were so simple. As to what reality really is, is another question. Itis a problem which has become acute in recent generations. Three things in particular have changed. Firstly, the natural sciences have enabled us to get behind our surface impressions, to understand that the physical world is no more than it seemsto be to me. Secondly, psychologists have discovered that our senses canall of them without exception be wrong: sight, smell, touch, and all. And thirdly, an increasingly materialistic outlook has led us to wonder whether there is any mind at all: the mind, said D.M. Armstrong, is nothing but the brain.

What should we do, then, with the old intuitive view, which leads us to set our mind apart from matter?

Since the 1950's, linguistics has been integral to the study of the mind, and it is linguistics we shall call upon here for help. Francis Bacon, four-hundred years ago, in his Novum Organum (Book 1:59), may have given us an unwitting clue as to what may be so different about the mind. There is an evil, he wrote, in dealing with natural and material things: the definitionsof these things consist of words, and these words beget words. 

To paraphrase Bacon, definitions consist of words, which have definitions which consist of words. This is much like having money in a bank, which has its money in another bank, which has its money in another bank, and so on. It is easy to see that one will never access one's money – which is the whole point of it after all. Similarly, our language, when we examine it closely, deals in nothings– yet nothing is the antithesis of the something that our reality is – or seems to be.

There are other ways of proving this “disjunction” between our language andreality. One of these is described in my Metaphysical Notes Part III. What seems clear is that, if this disjunction did not exist, we would be mere “machines”.

We therefore have a real reality, so to speak – which is however partnered with an unreal language which can never really get a grip on this reality we seem to know. The very nature of our language curiously distances our words – in fact our mental processes – from the reality which they describe. There is no real correspondence between the two. The mind, in a sense, hovers over the surface of reality. The mind  is wholly other.

The mind, one might say, functions in a completely different modeto the reality which we seem to know. This may well explainwhywe perceive our mind to be so different. It may explain, too, the many situations and states of mind which give us a sense of unreality or detachment: déjà vu, for instance, or the imposter syndrome, or a sense of alienation. As to whythe mind is wholly other, and what this means, are different questions, which we may examine in time.

---

Part II. Consciousness and Attention

Pointing to my arm, you ask me, “How did you cut yourself there?” “Oh!” I exclaim. “I really don't know. It completely escaped my attention!” Then, with a philosophical turn of mind, you ask me, “Were you consciousat the time that you cut yourself?” “Well of course!” Ireply. “At least, presumably I was! But, not about the cut.”

This imaginary conversation contrasts the concepts “attention” and “consciousness”. Consciousness is of course the more familiar of the two, although nobody really seems to know what it is, let alone how to explain it. Simon Blackburn tentatively suggests: the theatre where my thoughts and feelings have their existence. Attention, on the other hand, while not as well known, iswell established in psychology. Daniel Dennett defines it as the conscious awareness of information.

Could the two be one and the same? And if not, then what is the relationship between the two?

Just one-hundred years ago, it first came to the public attention that we might not be as conscious as we think – and at the time, people were (and they still are) loath to accept it. Yet one should have guessed it. Our very language is replete with words which speak of our lack of conscious awareness: we are oblivious, inattentive, napping, and so on. Alternatively, we may lose ourselves in what we are doing: we are, for instance, absorbed, preoccupied, immersed.

If then I am oblivious to my surroundings – or more accurately, to aspectsof my surroundings – am I always conscious? Similarly, if I am absorbed in my surroundings, am I always conscious? If I am absorbed in myself, or in the problems of the imaginary world of constructs, am I always conscious? Clearly, none of these states of mind would seem to be quite the same as being fully aware, awake, or alert.

There are, too, degrees of awareness. Norman Dixon famously ranked the conscious and non-conscious aspects of our sensory modalities (see the image). We easily become aware of pain, he noted. We are vaguely aware of smell. Yet we hardly become aware of what are called visceral interceptors, such as our heartbeat or breathing – even riding a bicycle, perhaps, while sending a text message. It is a hierarchy of that which, so to speak, grabs our attention.

Consciousness and attention might seem to be frightfully complex subjects– yet we find a common thread which runs through all our attentive moments, if not our conscious ones. We take notice of (and sometimes we especially ignore) novelty,discrepancy, and interruption – or perhaps rather, we take notice of that which representsnovelty, discrepancy, and interruption, to me. In short, we detect the “unexpected”, writes Richard Gregory. 

Let us pause at this point, to notice that this speaks of my taking notice, in every case, of some kind of contradiction. Novelty is a contradiction of that which I have been accustomed to. Discrepancy is a contradiction of that which I know. Interruption is a contradiction of that which I expect. Therefore, it is contradiction that arrests my attention, more than anything else. It is in moments of contradiction that I am most aware. And one does not need to see far to see that this further relates to reason – which we may explore, too, in time.

In short, consciousness has a lot to do with attention – and attention has a lot to do with those things which conflict. Now combine this with the fact that the pace of modern society todayis such that we need to process far more contradictions of many kinds than people used to do – many of whichwere not even contemplated one-hundred years ago. David Gelernter writes, with this in mind, that the modern mind is characterised by an ever more acute self-consciousness.

Not only this, notes Gelernter, but previous generations were far more disposed to low-focus thought – a thought which had and has little concept of contradiction or logicality. Pre-historic societies, perhaps, were no less intelligent than we are. Rather they entertained less contradictions – and perhaps, thereby, they were happier. 

---

Part III: Reason and Contradiction. 

Aspects of Mind

by Thomas Scarborough
 

---

Part I. Mind and Matter

I tap my finger on a table-top. I drink a glass of milk. I feel the warmth of the sun on my face. Such experiences seem perfectly real to me. So does the passion I have for my diesel pick-up, my grief over my grandmother's passing, or the fact that I am a Yorkshireman. Which means that, on the surface of it, my life seems real to me, through and through.

Now consider what this means to me philosophically. It seems to me, therefore, that I am living in a real world. It is not imagined, or illusory. Further, it would seem to me that I am an observerof this world, not merely a “robotic” presence there. And on this basis, it would seem to me that I have a mind which observes reality: mind here, reality there, which separates my mind from the matter which it observes.

If it were so simple. As to what reality really is, is another question. Itis a problem which has become acute in recent generations. Three things in particular have changed. Firstly, the natural sciences have enabled us to get behind our surface impressions, to understand that the physical world is no more than it seemsto be to me. Secondly, psychologists have discovered that our senses canall of them without exception be wrong: sight, smell, touch, and all. And thirdly, an increasingly materialistic outlook has led us to wonder whether there is any mind at all: the mind, said D.M. Armstrong, is nothing but the brain.

What should we do, then, with the old intuitive view, which leads us to set our mind apart from matter?

Since the 1950's, linguistics has been integral to the study of the mind, and it is linguistics we shall call upon here for help. Francis Bacon, four-hundred years ago, in his Novum Organum (Book 1:59), may have given us an unwitting clue as to what may be so different about the mind. There is an evil, he wrote, in dealing with natural and material things: the definitionsof these things consist of words, and these words beget words. 

To paraphrase Bacon, definitions consist of words, which have definitions which consist of words. This is much like having money in a bank, which has its money in another bank, which has its money in another bank, and so on. It is easy to see that one will never access one's money – which is the whole point of it after all. Similarly, our language, when we examine it closely, deals in nothings– yet nothing is the antithesis of the something that our reality is – or seems to be.

There are other ways of proving this “disjunction” between our language andreality. One of these is described in my Metaphysical Notes Part III. What seems clear is that, if this disjunction did not exist, we would be mere “machines”.

We therefore have a real reality, so to speak – which is however partnered with an unreal language which can never really get a grip on this reality we seem to know. The very nature of our language curiously distances our words – in fact our mental processes – from the reality which they describe. There is no real correspondence between the two. The mind, in a sense, hovers over the surface of reality. The mind  is wholly other.

The mind, one might say, functions in a completely different modeto the reality which we seem to know. This may well explainwhywe perceive our mind to be so different. It may explain, too, the many situations and states of mind which give us a sense of unreality or detachment: déjà vu, for instance, or the imposter syndrome, or a sense of alienation. As to whythe mind is wholly other, and what this means, are different questions, which we may examine in time.

---

Part II. Consciousness and Attention

Pointing to my arm, you ask me, “How did you cut yourself there?” “Oh!” I exclaim. “I really don't know. It completely escaped my attention!” Then, with a philosophical turn of mind, you ask me, “Were you consciousat the time that you cut yourself?” “Well of course!” Ireply. “At least, presumably I was! But, not about the cut.”

This imaginary conversation contrasts the concepts “attention” and “consciousness”. Consciousness is of course the more familiar of the two, although nobody really seems to know what it is, let alone how to explain it. Simon Blackburn tentatively suggests: the theatre where my thoughts and feelings have their existence. Attention, on the other hand, while not as well known, iswell established in psychology. Daniel Dennett defines it as the conscious awareness of information.

Could the two be one and the same? And if not, then what is the relationship between the two?

Just one-hundred years ago, it first came to the public attention that we might not be as conscious as we think – and at the time, people were (and they still are) loath to accept it. Yet one should have guessed it. Our very language is replete with words which speak of our lack of conscious awareness: we are oblivious, inattentive, napping, and so on. Alternatively, we may lose ourselves in what we are doing: we are, for instance, absorbed, preoccupied, immersed.

If then I am oblivious to my surroundings – or more accurately, to aspectsof my surroundings – am I always conscious? Similarly, if I am absorbed in my surroundings, am I always conscious? If I am absorbed in myself, or in the problems of the imaginary world of constructs, am I always conscious? Clearly, none of these states of mind would seem to be quite the same as being fully aware, awake, or alert.

There are, too, degrees of awareness. Norman Dixon famously ranked the conscious and non-conscious aspects of our sensory modalities (see the image). We easily become aware of pain, he noted. We are vaguely aware of smell. Yet we hardly become aware of what are called visceral interceptors, such as our heartbeat or breathing – even riding a bicycle, perhaps, while sending a text message. It is a hierarchy of that which, so to speak, grabs our attention.

Consciousness and attention might seem to be frightfully complex subjects– yet we find a common thread which runs through all our attentive moments, if not our conscious ones. We take notice of (and sometimes we especially ignore) novelty,discrepancy, and interruption – or perhaps rather, we take notice of that which representsnovelty, discrepancy, and interruption, to me. In short, we detect the “unexpected”, writes Richard Gregory. 

Let us pause at this point, to notice that this speaks of my taking notice, in every case, of some kind of contradiction. Novelty is a contradiction of that which I have been accustomed to. Discrepancy is a contradiction of that which I know. Interruption is a contradiction of that which I expect. Therefore, it is contradiction that arrests my attention, more than anything else. It is in moments of contradiction that I am most aware. And one does not need to see far to see that this further relates to reason – which we may explore, too, in time.

In short, consciousness has a lot to do with attention – and attention has a lot to do with those things which conflict. Now combine this with the fact that the pace of modern society todayis such that we need to process far more contradictions of many kinds than people used to do – many of whichwere not even contemplated one-hundred years ago. David Gelernter writes, with this in mind, that the modern mind is characterised by an ever more acute self-consciousness.

Not only this, notes Gelernter, but previous generations were far more disposed to low-focus thought – a thought which had and has little concept of contradiction or logicality. Pre-historic societies, perhaps, were no less intelligent than we are. Rather they entertained less contradictions – and perhaps, thereby, they were happier. 

---

Part III: Reason and Contradiction.